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JK: Quit day job in 1992 to go to grad school. In 1995, decide he didn’t want to complete PhD in chemistry, eventually decided to science writing internship. Then went on to do freelance, and has done it ever since.

MV: Screenwriter and filmmaker. Have a day job, but it’s a writing job. Got that as a result of a string of other writing. First time he’s had a consistent gig.

AB: Author of multiple series. Pretty much a full-time writer. Working on 18th novel, but still have a day job, two jobs a week.

What is the writing life like?

JK:

Currently have home office. Had an outside office, but stop using it.

I don’t get dressed or shower until noon. Doesn’t keep regular hours.

Had a regular job briefly, hated the regular hours. Would rather work when he wanted to in order to be happy and healthy.

Deadlines dictate when he needs to get certain work done.

MV:

Required to have bit of structure because of the company he works for.

To work at home, he prefers a place that quiet, cool, and calm.

But at work, he’s forced into an environment that loud and chaotic.

because of this, he’s abandoned the idea of structure, and just embraced the chaotic nature of the work.

On his own work, its about a routine: an outline and a quota. Because at the end of a day of work, the last thing he wants to do is write.

AB:

I like structure. I treat it as a job I have 5 days a week.

I don’t get dressed for the office.

I throw on clothes, make coffee, and as soon as my brain is engaged and start working.

The less time between waking and getting to the keyboard the better.

The less input, less sensory, the better.

I set a weekly word count equal to 1,500 words a day. This is what is needed to make the deadlines for the size of the novels I write.

I sit down from 8:30 in the morning until about 1:30.

At that point, it’s time to meet the day. Get cleaned up, and tend to all the other stuff. Nobody gets time in the writing slot except for the characters.

MV: The development is actual work too: sometimes its not just typing characters into a keyboard. It’s deep thinking about motivation before you’re ready to put words on the page.

AB: No matter what the process is, you have to be willing to produce the end product.

JK: You have to be willing to deal with the self-doubt. As a hobbyist, there’s no external pressure. If you never send off the novel, the editor doesn’t even know. But if you’re self-employed, you have to finish it and send it off, because you need it for the check, even if you’re worried that its a piece of shit.

AB: Know your writing style. Are you a sprinter or a marathoner? All of these are valid ways to get to the end-goal. But know what it right for you.

How do you deal with writing time vs. all the other things you can do?

MV: Ultimately it’s about holding yourself to a quota. And what helps you make that quota is an outline. Problems in Act 3 are almost always due to problems in Act 1 that weren’t resolved because there was no outline. Also, give yourself permission to suck.

AB: There’s a difference between 10 minutes of minesweeper to rest your brain and an hour of minesweeper to avoid writing.

Q: If you get blocked somewhere in the first draft, do you ever go back and edit as a way of making some progress?

AB: I do what I call musings. I open up another file, and just start typing about what I think the problems might be, what the characters might be thinking about. Sometimes this is like warming up after you’ve had an injury: you have to get the muscle warmed up.

Give yourself an ultimatum to do the chore you hate the most or write a 100 words. I guarantee that you’d rather write 100 words than to scrub the kitchen floor.

Before you quit your day job, what do you need to get from your writing?

AB: I’ve gradually decreased my hours at my day job down to two mornings. This has been very good to be able to gradually decrease.

If you hope to quit your day job and pay your mortgage and feed your kids, you should be writing under contract long before you give up your day job.

Don’t give up the day until your fiction is earning enough to pay all of your bills for a year.

Ideally you need to not only pay bills, but also put aside money for emergencies, savings, etc.

Agents will say you should have ten books in print before you consider it…

MV: It’s better to have a job and work some minimal hours than to simply quit. Determine how many hours a day you need to write, and then try to find a job that will support it.

You have to be prepared that this is a long haul… I went to a film school and they beat into your head that you’d need to do this for at least five years before you’d be able to make money at it.

Embrace any job that helps you further your goals: e.g. a tech writing job that gets you access to publishers.

JK: It’s hard to do this and it requires some luck. But it also requires being willing to embrace a different lifestyle. If you want to drive a new car, have new clothes, eat your meals out… then don’t quit your day job.

There are some, but not very many.

Be willing to scale back the lifestyle.

AB: Leave lean.

MV: If you’re writing you are probably doing it because you love it. Be prepared that at some time it’ll feel like a job, and you’ll hate it. Remember why you started doing it.

Q: What’s a likely amount of money to make?

AB: First advances are lucky to be $5,000, except for an exceptional few. And that comes in 3 payments over about 3 years, so it’s not a lot of money.

If you have 10 books in print, then royalties will start to add up, but it’s still a live lean lifestyle.

JK: I have a second income in the form of my wife who works.

How do you force yourself to get dressed and leave the house? How do you avoid feeling isolated?

AB: Why do I want to leave the house?

JK: It is isolating, and sometimes it bothers me, and sometimes it doesn’t.

I go out and meet with other writers every other week.

I get sick of being at home and go out.

My dogs force me to take them out.

Q: You’ve talked about the income, what about the expenses particular to writing?

AB: You need a computer, paper, electricity and time. The expense of writing is not great except that it is time.

MV: One cost is that you’ll have a scary credit history if you don’t have a steady income.

AB: Self-employment tax: the other 7.5% you need to pay into social security.

MV: Keep very clear records of your sources of income. I have 8 sources of income.

JK: Deduct everything you can.

Q: How does it work between writing and film-making?

MV: Over the last two years, I didn’t have a day job. When I had a film, I could film it. Now I have to negotiate the time off work from a job I want to keep.

My notes from OryCon 35 (2013) are a little shorter than usual this year, so rather than one blog post per panel, I’m consolidating posts.

(One meta-comment: There have been a fair number of panels about the future, including one that I was on. In every case, it feels like panelists consistently under-estimate the amount of change I think we’ll see in the future. In a panel I attended entitled “300 Years from Now” panelists discussed issues facing us today: water shortages, climate change, global economic divide, etc. while assuming that humans remain much like we are today. In 300 years, I think we’ll have gone past those problems, and we’ll be dealing with questions of what it means to be human when we’re 90% machine and 10% biological.)

Notes from The End of All Things at OryCon 35 – 2013

Kat Kenyon

Karen Azinger

Nancy Kress

Ru Emerson

Richard A. Lovett

What makes a bad ending

A scene so preordained the reader anticipated it for 100 pages

A climax that happens offstage.

This happens before the end, but it’s the most important. The very ending is the mopping up.

A scene that is obvious.

It should seem both inevitable and yet not obvious

The book should wrap up on its own terms

It should feel satisfying on its own

Especially for a first time novelist — there’s no trust that you’ll wrap it up later. No guarantee that the next book will come.

The inciting incident suggests what the story problem is. And at the climax it should be resolved.

The marrying and the burying: this is what comes after the climax.

What is the cost of success for the protagonist?

it should cost your character something. An emotional cost to the choices they make.

A writer’s secret weapon is theme.

The reader may or may not be able to articulate it. But if a book has no theme, the reader will say it doesn’t work.

Both the plot and the ending must involve the theme.

An action oriented book will have an action scene for its climax. The reader can see it coming. But there can often be an internal story was well (about the journey of the character, where they are moving to, what their shortcomings are.)

Dual arc story:

the arc of the situation

the arc of the character

the situation arc: the events of the story. it must affect the character, or the reader doesn’t care.

How to construct an ending both surprising and inevitable?

Plan for reversals

Even if the main story arc isn’t very surprising, other things will

There are betrayals, a surprise, a mystery.

Something that the reader didn’t see coming. So some is a surprise, and some seems expected.

Plant subtle clues ahead of time.

It leads to the sense of “oh, i should have known this was coming.”

What can go wrong now?

Then make it go wrong.

Then the character will be forced to change.

The choice ending…

As the reader progresses, it becomes obvious that the character is going to be forced to choose between two alternatives. Those alternatives become more obvious as the reader reads. But we don’t know which they’ll choose. The options should be roughly equally weighted.

Notes from One Lump or Two: How much Technology is Too Much?

Richard A. Lovett

Patrick Swenson

Gordon Eklund

Annie Bellet

David W. Goldman

How much science in a story for it to be science fiction?

RL: None! Science fiction is extrapolation from something. It’s based in reality. But it doesn’t need to be about science.

PS: My stories are about what-if… extrapolation about what we know now into the future. not just science, but our culture and society. But… cool science and cool tech goes a long way. My editor asked me to add more technology into the the early chapters to ground the reader. Happy to do that…required research on my part.

GE: Heinlein quote: the perfect science fiction story is a story that, at some point in the future, would just be a contemporary fiction story.

RL: Explain enough of the science so that people understand how it works. Work out a lot, but put the minimum necessary in the story.

PS: Consulting with (editor? scientist?), asked what was necessary: Don’t violate certain principles, and then hand wave the rest.

DG: You don’t need to explain what we don’t know (e.g. how a warp drive would work), but you do need to avoid explaining things in a way that violates what we do know (e.g. faster-than-light travel without special conditions).

DG: There are some stories that are about science. They’re about a specific scientific idea, and then a story is wrapped around it. But that’s the minority of all stories.

RL: Lots of research that doesn’t go into the book. Had to write a spreadsheet tracking oxygen consumption over 24 hours according to exercise levels of the protagonist. That doesn’t go into the book, but its there to make sure the science is right.

What makes a story age well or not with respect with technology?

The emotional arc of the story.

The story has to hold up without the technology.

Don’t put dates in story, because that really affects how people perceive it.

A lot of science fiction written during the cold war is about the soviet union: now it’s alternate history.

Older science fiction is a time capsule to the future of a different time.

Now matter how forward looking science fiction is, it’s always a commentary on the time in which it was written.

LG: The main issue is not ebooks or self-publishing but attention. The number of people buying and finishing books. How do we find and keep and communicate with readers?

Reading on screens – notifications pop up, getting an email to watch a youtube video. Many people complain that its harder to finish a novel. People get excited about interactive media on the web.

PS: A challenge to traditional publishing is the platform… People have multiple electronic devices and its a chore to move between them. The competition for attention is not just what form of entertainment we want, but the cost of moving to the platform where the books are.

MS/M: The counter to that is that if someone recommends a book, I can easily and immediately go buy it. So I’m more likely to buy a book.

Is the business changing?

LG: Absolutely. The challenge is getting readers in contact with our authors. The main job of editors is not editing. 60-70% of the time in the office is spent figuring out how to get books to readers, anything from managing blurbs to editing meta-data, etc. In the past, getting attention meant getting 12 traditional book reviews. Now it might mean two traditional reviews and fifty blog mentions.

Amazon is a pretty amazing company. They create a very compelling shopping experience encompassing nearly every category of product, they make the discovery and shopping experience easy, and customer reviews have transformed shopping by helping us find quality products and avoid crappy ones. Shopping online helps save time when shopping and running around town. And of course, as an indie author, 99% of my book sales are through Amazon.

For all that, Amazon is not a panacea. The same scale that allows recommendations, reviews, and low pricing to work also has negative side effects. There are many, but I’ll just mention a few:

As more book buying moves online to Amazon and to ebooks, it becomes harder for local bookstores to survive. Some might say “who cares?” but for the 20% of Americans without Internet access, bookstores and libraries are how they access books. For younger children, bookstores are an exciting place of discovery. My kids love visiting any bookstore. But bookstores can’t survive on childrens books and only a small percentage of adults visiting them.

As an author, I’m very concerned that 99% of my book sales are through Amazon. What if they change their policies and decide to offer half the royalty rate? Without any other effective distribution outlet, I’d be screwed. I’m delighted to sell as many books as I do there, but I’d be much more comfortable if I was also selling elsewhere.

Local, indie bookstores are owned by people, whereas Amazon is a global corporation. As I’ve mentioned before, every time we make a credit card purchase with a global corporation, we’re sending our money to the 1% of wealthiest people. Yes, we’re supporting them. If you spend your money at a local bookstore, a much greater percentage is actually staying people like you and me.

Recently I’ve learned about two great ways you can support local bookstores: IndieBound and Kobo.

Kobo is an alternate ebook reading platform. Like Amazon, they have ereader devices and reading apps for all major smartphones and tablets. Like Amazon, they have millions of books, usually at the same price as Amazon. What’s different from Amazon is that they sell their ereading devices through local, indie bookstores. And when you buy a Kobo ereader from a local bookstore, a percentage of revenue of every single book you buy continues to support that bookstore for the life of the device. If you use a Kobo app instead, you can still support a local bookstore by purchasing ebooks through the affiliate website of your local bookstore.

In other words, you can get most of the benefits of shopping with a major online ebook store while still supporting your local bookstore.

IndieBound is an affiliation of local bookstores that are members of the American Booksellers Association. Through the IndieBound website, you can find and order books online, just as you would through Amazon, but instead your purchase benefits your local bookstore. And because the IndieBound website searches the large, commercial databases, nearly everything available on Amazon is also available through IndieBound, even if it’s a specialty, published-on-demand book.

So the next time you reach for the mouse to buy a book, give Kobo or IndieBound a try.

Kobo Books is a great ebook retailer with worldwide distribution, their own reader-focused ereaders, and reading apps for all major platforms (iOS, Android, Mac, PC, and web).

Free on Kobo through the end of September 2013 with the coupon code elopesgift

Kobo is also an indie-bookstore friendly company. Their devices are sold in indie bookstores, and many indie bookstores have an affiliate relationship with Kobo. If you care about DRM, my books are all DRM-free on Kobo.

By the time a novel is done, from rough first drafts until final proofing, I’ve read it close to twenty times. However, the one of the best reads is when it’s finally Done, with a capital D, Done. That’s when I get to read it as a reader, not a writer. It usually happens a few weeks after it’s been published. I get a paperback copy that’s not already spoken for, and I hole up in a comfy chair or couch and start reading.

That happened with The Last Firewall this past weekend, when I had four days at the beach with my family.

But I was shocked to find a missing page in the paperback — and in one of the most exciting scenes, no less. I’m so sorry for the mistake!

Most copies sold so far have been the Kindle version, but for the thirty or so folks who have the paperback, you’re holding what we can hope will someday be a rare collector’s copy. 🙂

I will get the paperback copy fixed as soon as possible (and will clean up the other smaller mistakes I found as well.) In the meanwhile, if you get to the bottom of page 151, in the bar fight scene, these are the four missing paragraphs you’re looking for:

Knowing the robot used the visual channel to attack, she instead built a three-dimensional wireframe from street and security cameras, calculated the bot’s location, and pointed the muzzle in the direction of the window.

The three-inch rocket whooshed out, guidance fins snapping into position. It exited the bar at two hundred miles per hour and twisted hard, gunning for the bot.

Cat’s wireframe fuzzed out, right in the middle where the robot should be, and the rocket veered off. Her heart sank as it exploded against a neighboring building.

“Catherine Matthews,” boomed the robot. “Surrender. You are surrounded. I am a military-grade combat bot. You cannot hope to succeed and we do not wish to harm you.”

In the year 2035, robots, artificial intelligences, and neural implants have become commonplace. The Institute for Applied Ethics keeps the peace, using social reputation to ensure that robots and humans don’t harm society or each other. But a powerful AI named Adam has found a way around the restrictions.

Catherine Matthews, nineteen years old, has a unique gift: the ability to manipulate the net with her neural implant. Yanked out of her perfectly ordinary life, Catherine becomes the last firewall standing between Adam and his quest for world domination.

Two+ years in the making, I’m just so excited to finally release this novel. As with my other novels, I explore themes of what life will be like with artificial intelligence, how we deal with the inevitable man-vs-machine struggle, and the repercussions of using online social reputation as a form of governmental control.

“An insightful and adrenaline-inducing tale of what humanity could become and the machines we could spawn.” – Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger

“A fun read and tantalizing study of the future of technology: both inviting and alarming.” – Harper Reed, former CTO of Obama for America, Threadless

“A fascinating and prescient take on what the world will look like once computers become smarter than people. Highly recommended.” – Mat Ellis, Founder & CEO Cloudability

“A phenomenal ride through a post-scarcity world where humans are caught between rogue AIs. If you like having your mind blown, read this book!” – Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“The Last Firewall is like William Gibson had a baby with Tom Clancy and let Walter Jon Williams teach it karate. Superbly done.” – Jake F. Simons, author of Wingman and Train Wreck

Here’s a quick peek at the cover for The Last Firewall. We may make a few tweaks, but that’s the general layout.

We’re still targeting a mid-August release. I’m working with my designer, the wonderful Maureen Gately, on the interior pages right now.

I’ll soon start generating the ebook versions for Kindle, Kobo, and other ereaders.

In a few spare moments here and there, I’m reading Ramez Naam’s upcoming Crux, which is great, and will be out on August 27th. I’ll have a full review next month. It’s a sequel to his first novel, Nexus. If you haven’t read Nexus, go get a copy now.

I know I’ve gone dark over the last few months. I’m sure that’s left many people wondering about the status of The Last Firewall, my third Singularity novel.

I’m delighted to announce that The Last Firewall will be available this summer. I’m targeting an August launch.

So why the long wait?

As you may know, my previous novels are all self-published. They’ve sold well, but I often wondered how many more readers might find my books if I went with a traditional publisher.

In addition, many folks have asked “When will we see the movie version?” about Avogadro Corp and A.I. Apocalypse, but very few self-published novels have made that leap. Hollywood often judges potential movie options by the interest publishers take in novels. That was another reason why I was interested in traditional publication.

I started working with a literary agent who saw great promise in The Last Firewall, but wanted substantial revisions. I subsequently worked on The Last Firewall for another eight months until it gleamed brighter than the titanium shell of a robot.

That’s where I’ve been for a while, and I think the results are great: I’m convinced it reads better than anything I’ve done before, and a few other folks have read the manuscript and agree.

However, traditional publishing is a tough nut to crack, and if I persist with that path, The Last Firewall will continue to languish on my computer when it really wants to be read.

So I’m self-publishing The Last Firewall, as I have my other novels. It’s worked great in the past, and I’m happy to be going this route again. I’m choosing cover images and working on cover design right now, even as the manuscript undergoes a final round of proofreading.

I think it’s going to be awesome, and can’t wait to get it in your hands. If you haven’t done so, sign up for the mailing list and I’ll let you know when it’s available.